Episode 183 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 35 - Chapter 14 - The New Virtues 06 - Honesty
Date: 07/22/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3197-episode-183-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-35-chapter-14-the-new-virtues-06-ho/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 183 continues Chapter 14, “The New Virtues,” turning from justice to honesty — which DeWitt treats not as mere truth-telling but as a sweeping virtue encompassing parrhesia (frank speech), freedom from sycophancy, and the courage to speak plainly even to hostile audiences. Cassius and Joshua survey the political dimension of honesty first: Athens’s circumscribed tradition of free speech; the dangers of speaking to mobs or monarchs (VS 67: “a life of freedom cannot amass great riches because success is difficult without servitude to mobs or monarchs”); the city of Lampsacus as a refuge for persecuted philosophers including Epicurus himself; and Socrates’ trial as a case where free speech was not protected. DeWitt’s account of Epicurean pamphleteering as a safer and more effective vehicle for philosophy is explored through examples: the Diogenes of Oenoanda wall inscription, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson’s secret translation of Lucretius, and Cicero’s complaint that ordinary tradesmen seemed to understand Epicurus better than he did. The episode examines Epicurus’s VS 29 preference (“to issue oracles beneficial to mankind even if not a soul understands me rather than harvest lush praise from the multitude”), the critique of the Socratic method as fundamentally dishonest through concealment, Epicurus’s condemnation of Platonic esoteric doctrines and the “noble lie,” and DeWitt’s thesis that nature herself demands incorruptibility in her disciples. Joshua contributes extended commentary on the gray rock method in modern psychology as principled strategic silence, Cleopatra’s rage at contradiction in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Leo Strauss’s contested interpretation of Plato’s Republic, and Philodemus’s On Frank Speech as the Epicurean handbook on this virtue. The episode closes with DeWitt’s summary: Epicurean honesty is “total integrity of character — enjoined by nature, destroyed by the study of rhetoric and dialectic, and demanding total loyalty to friends combined with absolute frankness in mutual criticism.” Martin has nothing to add; Callistheni is absent; next week: faith.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius: Welcome to episode 183 of Lucretius Today. We are continuing in chapter 14, “The New Virtues” of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. Last week we discussed the topic of justice and this week we’re going to take on the topic of honesty. We have a basic definition of honesty that means you’re not lying, but there are a lot of things covered here that are of interest to many aspects of Epicurean philosophy that we will talk about in detail today. Honesty is probably deceptively simple in how it’s applied. It’s one of these virtues where it sounds like it’s always good to be honest and yet it’s easy to come up with situations where honesty is not necessarily the best policy. A classic example is when someone is in the hospital and very sick — do you go in and give them a detailed explanation of how sick they are that might make them even more depressed and less likely to fight back against the illness, or do you keep that information from them thinking that their mental state might help them recover? All sorts of questions like that about when honesty is appropriate. Honesty can blend over into bluntness or other words that imply that you’re being less than tactful in the way you speak to people. And so the use of the word honesty here is something that we’re going to be discussing, starting with freedom of speech. DeWitt says in the political sphere it signified the right of every citizen to stand up in the public assembly and express his honest opinion. So one aspect of what we’re talking about here under honesty is freedom of speech — the ability to speak freely to others about what’s really on your mind.
Joshua: Right, so this issue of freedom of speech in the ancient world and in Athens in particular is an interesting one. I don’t think we could really say that they had a very robust freedom of speech compared to what we enjoy today in many Western-style democracies in the world. But it was certainly far in advance, probably, of what had come before, and certainly very far in advance of what would come after — particularly in late antiquity and then in the medieval period in the Middle Ages. So they had this sort of structure or framework of what was appropriate to say, and where you would say it, and what kind of authorities would be in place to deal with it. So one of the places that was very strictly controlled as to what you could say was the gymnasium, because that’s where we’re really trying to mold the minds of young people to become good Athenians and good Greeks, to become good soldiers and leaders and statesmen. And in this case, we don’t want just any old person like Epicurus, for example, to come in and say all his nonsense about how the gods aren’t concerned about us and death is nothing to fear and this is just one world among many and everything is made of little particles called atoms. So in the gymnasium — kind of like today, where we have these school board wars over what should be taught and who should have control over what should be taught — very much the same kind of thing was happening in the ancient world. And so you have in the trial of Socrates one of the things he was charged for was corrupting the minds of the youth. That is a case where Athens did not protect his freedom of speech because it was his speech that had consequences. And those consequences, at least for the Athenians who condemned him on the second vote — the first vote was indecisive — the Athenians who condemned him on the second vote thought that that was something that was beyond the pale of what should be included under this umbrella of parrhesia, freedom of speech. And we should also understand probably that different cities in the ancient world would have different standards. And what’s interesting is that he brings up here this city of Lampsacus, which is on the Hellespont on the western coast of Asia Minor. And it’s a city that people are continually fleeing to for refuge after they have angered people, whether that’s in Athens or in the city of Mytilene. Anaxagoras was brought up on charges in Athens in the generation before Socrates, once again for teaching the wrong stuff in the gymnasium. He managed to escape, was willing to escape, and he went to Lampsacus. So I guess this influence between Greek and Persian culture in Lampsacus allowed for an environment where these philosophers who were sort of ticking off the establishment could go for refuge. And Epicurus himself does that after he annoys the Platonists of Mytilene. He goes to Lampsacus, which is where he finds most of his new friends. So ancient Greece is not a monolith really in any way that matters, but particularly when it comes to ideas of educating the young, different city-states will have their different views, and what should be permitted by law is going to be very different in different city-states. Sparta is going to have a very different outlook on a lot of this stuff than Athens, and Athens may have been one of the better — at least from my point of view, as a person who likes freedom of speech — Athens may have been better than others. But nowhere in the ancient world, I don’t think, did we really have the kind of really robust protection of speech as we do in, like I say, Western-style democracies today.
Cassius: Right. Rather than having a discussion on honesty and saying, “honesty is the best policy,” we’re starting out with almost a political or social aspect of honesty — in terms of who you’re talking to and what the considerations are going to be in the different contexts in which you might be speaking. Which has introduced us to the idea that Athens had this freedom of speech attitude toward the public assemblies, but that it was limited and could get you in trouble if you didn’t exercise it properly. DeWitt continues on with VS 67, quote: “A life of freedom cannot amass great riches because of success being difficult without servitude to mobs or monarchs.” DeWitt says that if a difference is to be made, he preferred the monarch, whom he is willing to placate in an emergency. But from the political life, he withdrew absolutely. And another fragment that he quotes here: “Never did I feel the desire to please the multitude. For the tricks that would please them, I did not learn. And what I did understand was foreign to the outlook such as they have.”
Joshua: That’s a very important point that he makes there — that Epicurus in many places he goes, and many places that his philosophy goes after he dies, he does not get a good reception from the people, the hoi polloi or the multitude. Lucian of Samosata gives an excellent example of this in that essay against Alexander the Oracle Monger, when there’s this one Epicurean who challenges the authority and the honesty of the oracle and he’s almost stoned to death by the mob. And Lucian in one of his more interesting witticisms said, what right did he have to be the only sane man in a crowd full of madmen? That’s the danger of getting too close with — I hesitate to say mob, because that’s a little bit emotive in a way that I don’t intend it — but to rely too much on the people, or large groups of the people acting as a body, and to put your trust in them is a very difficult and dangerous thing to do in the ancient world, I think.
Cassius: Or in the modern world. It seems like people together — when they herd almost like animals — in terms of losing their individual restraint, they become more emotional and more subject to shifting back and forth.
Joshua: Yep. Now, monarchs — you have a similar problem. One of the, I guess, motifs of Greek drama is — you know, Aristotle has his idea that there should be in drama unity of theme, unity of action, and unity of place. So the whole story takes place in one setting — at the front of the temple or whatever, or a palace — and so anything that happens outside of that has to be brought in by messengers. And this is where we get this phrase that we still use: “don’t shoot the messenger.” And an early example of that is recorded in Plutarch’s Lives, where he relates a story in which the first messenger that gave notice of the Roman general Lucullus’ coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that he had his head cut off for his pains, and no man dared to bring further information. So in a world where people have this really amazing kind of power and there are no checks against that kind of power, you do run into danger by simply telling the truth at every turn. And so that has, of course, survived today in this phrase, “don’t shoot the messenger.” Of course, today it’s very unlikely that someone will actually kill the messenger. But in the ancient world, particularly in Greek drama and the stories they like to tell each other, this was fairly common.
Cassius: Yeah, it can make you very unpopular to deliver bad news, whether it’s a monarch or a mob or any number of people — which I guess highlights the issue that the people who are listening to you can punish you if they don’t like what you’re saying. DeWitt emphasizes next sort of the reverse of that. He talks about the power of a multitude to tempt the speaker to be false to himself, and that Epicurus extends this even to the wise man who’s giving lectures. He quotes: “The wise man will give readings before a crowd but not of his own initiative.” And Horace said something similar: “I do not give readings for anyone unless friends and that under compulsion.”
Joshua: One thing that DeWitt said earlier on in this book is that the ancient Epicureans were pamphleteers, right? This is part of how they transmitted their philosophy — by writing letters. We have three letters of Epicurus that survived, plus his will, his letter to Idomeneus. But he wrote these letters with the knowledge that the recipients of the letters — Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoikeus — weren’t going to just keep them to themselves. These letters were going to be shared among friends. They were going to be copied, distributed into assemblies where people gathered. People would pass them from hand to hand. This was a much safer way, generally speaking, to share the philosophy with people who were outside of the circle rather than going to the gymnasium and whipping a bunch of people up into a frenzy about it, because that isn’t going to be good for anybody. And Epicurean philosophy is the kind of philosophy in the ancient world that people would be encouraged to oppose — the suspicion to that effect.
Cassius: Safer and more effective. I mean, you have example after example — you’ve talked about the letters of Epicurus. You could include within that Lucretius’s poem. You could include within that Diogenes of Oenoanda’s wall. One of his speeches, Cicero talks about that someone should send him a pamphlet — referring to an Epicurean who was in the habit of using pamphlets. The written word is more appropriate to philosophical discussions than just talking to a crowd. And it’s a little more sinuous in getting into all the little cracks.
Joshua: You mentioned Lucretius’s poem. One of my favorite weird stories about that is that one of the first English language translations of Lucretius came from a very unusual source. It was a Puritan woman named Lucy Hutchinson. And one of the things she did, after she composes this translation and it starts to circulate, is she sends almost like a letter of apology to the Earl of Anglesey to explain why she had undertaken translating the poem and why she now disavowed every one of its tenets. And one of the things she says to him is — I wanted to have a better understanding of things that I was hearing so much about secondhand. So the men in her family have more liberty when it comes to leaving the house for one, but also reading dangerous books for another. They’re talking about this poem by Lucretius and they know that it’s kind of a dangerous poem and maybe they find it interesting or agree with it or maybe they don’t, but the point is that it has found its way into these small intimate spaces where people are talking about it with one another. She’s overhearing these conversations and wants to know more. And the written word can do that. It can get into all these little gaps that you don’t get into by going to the Areopagus, for example, in Athens like Saint Paul did in that famous story in the Bible. You can still get in trouble with what you write as opposed to what you say.
Cassius: DeWitt next takes us to the example that parrhesia indicates — at times at least — that the speaker is telling what he honestly believes without regard for the feelings of others, and in certain instances that actually adds up to defiance. Epicurus exemplified it when he assailed the Platonists, who he called “the Deep-Voiced” — which was accusing them of being like second-rate actors in a theater where they would pitch their voices absurdly low in the performance of kingly roles — and that Metrodorus dubbed the young Platonists would-be Lycurguses and Solons. DeWitt explains that as a reference to Plato’s Philosopher King — the idea that court posts would be open to graduates of the Academy and that there would be a practical way to implement the views of Plato’s Republic and his ideas of regimentation and government. And that being able to convince people like a Cicero, for example, in a court of law, that would have great value to the institutions of government but also to the student of Platonism who might find himself useful in that role. And DeWitt says that Epicurus in VS 29 is making it very clear: “As for myself, I should prefer to practice the outspokenness demanded by the study of nature and to issue the kind of oracles that are beneficial to all mankind, even if not a soul shall understand, rather than by falling into step with popular opinions to harvest the lush praise that falls from the favor of the multitude.” The emphasis seems to be here that he would prefer to be actually honest and clear and direct even if the people don’t understand him. And we seem to have many examples of that when we read the Epicurean texts — when he talks about the gods having certain attributes that most people don’t understand, or uses the word virtue or pleasure or any other term in a way that people have trouble with because they don’t understand what he means given his definitions of those words. But Epicurus is saying that he’s going to tell them the truth as he sees it even if not a soul understands him.
Joshua: Yeah, and in fact Cicero — we have an interesting example of the reception of Epicurus’s works because Cicero famously complained. He said: do the Epicureans — these tradesmen and people who work every day of their lives — do they really understand Epicurean philosophy while I, Cicero, do not? So we have a complaint from a very well-educated Roman that he doesn’t even understand what Epicurus is trying to say, but that people who are drawn to Epicurean philosophy are at least pretending to understand it, and he finds that very frustrating.
Cassius: Yeah, this quote talks about how he would prefer to be outspoken and honest as opposed to saying something that would please the multitude. That’s what he’s saying here. Obviously Epicurus like anyone else wants to be understood and goes to great pains to be understood. You do your best to be clear. The problem and the issue comes when you attempt to soft-pedal or compromise or so carefully word what you’re saying that you change the meaning to make the people who are listening to you happy. That would be the antithesis of honesty. You want to communicate, yes, but you don’t want to change what you’re communicating in order to simply make your listener receive it more happily.
Cassius: Lucretius talks about this so often in the poem — he talks about that people consider Epicurean philosophy to be bitter and he therefore delivers it by rimming the cup with honey, which is not to say that he does not deliver the truth. It’s just that he delivers the truth in a way that explains it to them clearly, in a way that perhaps they can accept without changing the honesty of what he’s presenting.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s a very good point. One more thing that I should have mentioned because I mentioned the trial of Socrates earlier — there was another issue where freedom of speech comes up in that case, and it has to do with what we’ve been talking about regarding how sometimes books are received differently to the spoken word. Socrates has this moment in the trial where the prosecutor accuses him of having claimed that the sun was not a god, and Socrates says interestingly — he says, I never actually did make that claim. I don’t know whether the sun is a god or not, but Anaxagoras did say that the sun was not a god. He said that the sun was a ball of hot metal larger than the Peloponnese, and his books are on sale — you can go buy them in the agora for a drachma. So you’re going to kill me for saying something, but it’s written in a book that is on everybody’s bookshelf. So it gives us some insight into how the spoken word was received differently from the written word. But as Epicurus is saying here, how you say it, what you say, and who you say it to — it’s also going to have a different impact.
Cassius: DeWitt says it calls for no courage to stand in front of the assembly and report: “We have sacrificed to Zeus the Savior and to Athena and to Victory, and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you” — as an example of the kind of thing that the mob wants to hear. DeWitt says it does call for courage to flout popular belief and declare that the gods are immune to anger and gratitude and have no part in human affairs. And then DeWitt continues on — it calls for no courage to exalt virtue. Even hypocrites will applaud it. It does call for courage to declare that pleasure has been ordained by nature as the consummation of life. Even those who so believed might prefer to be reticent. But that is certainly a theme of much of what we talk about — virtue is applauded by the multitude and by the monarchs, everyone agrees that virtue has a great sound to it and we want to be virtuous, and therefore it really does call for no courage to call for it because everybody accepts that word as something that is desirable. But it does call for courage to discuss something like Epicurean philosophy, which people do not understand to be desirable, and in fact think to be corrupting, in arguing that pleasure is the ultimate standard.
Joshua: Yeah, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra he has this exchange in Act Five, Scene Two, in which Cleopatra is talking with this person named Dolabella who is like a servant or whatever, and Cleopatra says: “I dreamt there was an emperor Antony. Oh, such another sleep that I might see but such another man! His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck a sun and a moon which kept their course and lighted the little O, the earth. His legs bestrode the ocean, his reared arm crested the world. His voice was propertied as all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; but when he meant to quail and shake the orb, he was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, there was no winter in it — an autumn it was that grew the more by reaping. His delights were dolphin-like; they showed his back above the element they lived in. In his livery walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were as plates dropped from his pocket.” And then she says to her servant: “Think you there was or might be such a man as this I dreamt of?” Remember — this is Cleopatra, essentially a vassal of Rome but the queen, the pharaoh of Egypt — and the servant says, “Gentle madam, no.” And this sends Cleopatra into a rage: “You lie up to the hearing of the gods.” So it’s dangerous to contradict people — “contradict” of course means to speak against — so it’s dangerous to do that, particularly to powerful people.
Cassius: I have to comment at this point that Antony — I’d never read some of the references that DeWitt talks about here — that Antony himself might have been to some extent an associate or in the favor of Philodemus, and that there are different descriptions of Antony that indicate that he had certain Epicurean characteristics, which people say as well about Julius Caesar. So this is an interesting historical detail that perhaps Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra has some Epicurean angles in it as well.
Joshua: You know, I have an essay which I’ll give the title of but which I have not read. It’s in this book called Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age, edited by Sergio Jona and Gregson Davis. This is the fifth essay and it is “Caesar the Epicurean? A Matter of Life and Death” by Katarina Volk. That essay is out there — I’ll probably have to read it very soon now that we’re talking about it and give my opinion. But that’s the same book, by the way, that T.H. Geller-Gaoad’s article on Lucretius and the size of the sun is in. So I’ve been very impressed so far with what I’ve read.
Cassius: Well, if it’s a matter of life and death we certainly need to read it — so I’ll add that to my list as well. Okay, we’ve just been discussing how it calls for no courage to exalt virtue but it does call for courage to tell the multitude the truth — that there is no absolute law and that pleasure and pain are ultimately what’s given by nature for the direction of their lives. DeWitt says the sanction for this outspokenness was discovered in the example of nature herself — and in the passage last quoted above he speaks of “the outspokenness demanded by the study of nature.” Here’s an interesting line from DeWitt — and this is DeWitt of course and not Epicurus directly — DeWitt doesn’t mince words: nature demands this virtue because she is incorruptible herself and requires the same virtue in her disciples. It’s kind of interesting to think about what DeWitt even means there in terms of nature being incorruptible. I presume that this is a reference to the fact that ultimately, while we have the ability to change our local circumstances for a short period of time, it is impossible to ultimately overrule the laws of nature — certainly in something like death, you cannot overrule the effect of nature. And so if you’re going to set nature as your standard, and you realize that nature cannot be ultimately overruled and you’re going to consider nature to be incorruptible in that sense, and if you’re emulating nature, then you yourself should attempt to be as incorruptible as you can and as honest as you can in pursuing those things that you see as the best course to pursue.
Cassius: DeWitt cites VS 45: “The study of nature turns out men not given to vain display or empty talk or to showing off the education prized by the multitude, but rather men who are defiant and self-sufficient and proud of their inalienable blessings instead of the goods of circumstance.” And then the Letter to Pythocles — he talks about an “incomparable robustness” that’s conferred by the study of nature. So DeWitt says the good Epicurean defies fortune, is self-sufficient under the compulsions of necessity, and sets these inalienable virtues above wealth, fame, and office, which can be lost.
Joshua: Right — the goods of circumstance. Metrodorus, according to Diogenes Laertius at least, was supposed to have written a scroll called On Noble Birth or something to that effect — dealing with this issue that Epicurus’s critics in the ancient world pointed out that his parentage was very, very low compared to some of these other thinkers, that his father was a traveling school teacher, one of the lowest possible professions a man could have at that time, and his mother was very poor and went from house to house reading charms or horoscopes or whatever. But that would be an example of being proud of the goods of circumstance. Being proud of your noble birth would be to be proud of something that you had nothing to do with, and Epicurus is, I think, rightly critical of that. There is no utility in being proud of things that you had nothing to do with and have no control over. Just like you would say to the opposite person that to be born in squalor is not something to be ashamed of. And actually Horace is very, very good on this point because Horace’s father was a freed slave. And Horace, of course, rose to very high ranks — not in government necessarily in Rome, but in culture and in society. He was a very esteemed poet, one of the greatest poets of his age, and very widely read. And he says that he has no shame that his father was a freed man — he’s actually very proud of his father. So one of the issues that’s tied up in all of this is you’re dealing with a society that is to an extent far more than, again, the one we live in, probably class-based, status-based. We still have all of that, of course, but to think that it was something shameful to come from poor parents was something that Epicurus was roundly criticized for by his opponents, who thought that philosophers should come from noble stock, I guess, is the question.
Cassius: And related to what I was just saying: it was the judgment of Epicurus that human beings are not conceived in sin but born in honesty. This is, of course, a claim that is in total contravention to the prevailing orthodoxy, at least in Christianity. Human beings in their natural native state are not born in sin. There is no original sin like we find in Christianity as it would later develop. He says the newborn child is not yet perverted by the conventional education. So it’s the education that has been arranged for them by the sophists and sycophants of government that actually causes the problem. It’s not birth itself that makes children grow up to be wrong about so much of what Epicurus thought the Platonists, for example, were wrong about. It’s the education that they get that actually does that to them.
Joshua: Yeah, there’s some really important stuff we’re discussing here. Again, even though the context is just the single word “honesty,” we’re talking about some extremely deep material — because what could be more pregnant with meaning than the way you look at human life, human children, and say that they’re born with original sin and they’re worms and perverted as something to be ashamed of, even at birth before they’ve even done a thing for themselves, versus Epicurus looking to the newborn child as the best way to determine what it is that nature wants you to do with your life? You can hardly find a greater contrast than those two perspectives that Judeo-Christianity teaches us versus what Epicurus teaches.
Cassius: Going back just a moment to VS 45 — we’ve been talking mostly the last few minutes about not being proud of your upbringing and things that are goods of circumstance. As usual, Epicurus is telling us not only what not to do, but also giving us an idea of the proper perspective. He’s not getting rid of pride — he’s putting pride in other areas of life. People who study nature are men “who are defiant and self-sufficient and proud of their inalienable blessings.” Inalienable blessings being presumably those things we talk about regularly that Epicurus values — such as friendship and the reasoned understanding that comes from a proper philosophy. It’s almost like — and I think you’ve said this before, Joshua — but this chapter of “The New Virtues” here is longer, and it’s almost like we’re going through and finally producing from the basics of Epicurean philosophy a list of the attitudes and perspectives and the actions that people will take under the influence of Epicurean philosophy. And VS 45 is a really good summary of what you can expect the person who has absorbed Epicurean philosophy to be like. DeWitt says that to preserve this natural honesty is indispensable for the happy life, and DeWitt explains that Epicurus did not tell Pythocles to flee from every form of culture, but when you understand where Epicurus is coming from, what he’s meaning is to shun the whole program of education — which, as you’ve just been discussing, Joshua, he called the dialecticians wholesale corruptors. And now one example of this was the Epicurean attitude toward Socrates — that Socrates, because of his dishonest affectation of ignorance and his concealment of the deadly weapon of dialectic, was judged guilty of cheating. Even though we today consider this Socratic method — which is used in law schools and different types of teaching — as a brilliant method of teaching, Epicurus is not looking at it beneficially as often people do today. He’s looking at not only the fact that it is so frustrating to deal with when people will not answer your question except with a question, that it goes beyond just not beneficial — that it’s actually harmful because you’re not being honest with the person you’re dealing with.
Joshua: Yeah, exactly — you’re being a jerk. Just say what you mean. Socrates — that’s the objection here. And it is sometimes, when you read the dialogues of Plato, a little bit frustrating to see Socrates in action — and particularly how he twists things around and manipulates the conversation, which of course is what Plato is doing. The whole project of manipulating the dialectic and the conversation in one direction so that only the conclusion that Plato has selected is the one that is arrived at by the conversation — so that whole project can be very frustrating to read. But some people find it very enjoyable.
Cassius: Right, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions, but when you carry it to the extreme of never giving your own position, never giving an answer to the questions that you raise, then you’ve really crossed the line.
Joshua: I think the example comes out in again Book One of Cicero’s De Finibus. Torquatus specifically says that when he gets ready to talk about Epicurus, he doesn’t want Cicero interrupting him. He’s not going to be going back and forth with question and answer. He wants to give a continuous discourse, a narrative presentation — he has something to say, he wants to be clear about it, and he wants to present it to the listener and not just engage in this back-and-forth game of question and answer.
Cassius: DeWitt cites one of the fragments and says that this is basically a thrust at Socrates himself. The fragment reads, quote: “The man who has once attained wisdom never exhibits the opposite diathesis, nor does he deliberately simulate.” And he says the honesty of the wise man is absolute, that quote: “He will be the same man in his sleep.”
Joshua: Right — once you’ve attained to wisdom, you’re not going to play the fool just to get people to go along with it or just to lead them to the conclusion you want to lead them to. You’re just going to lay it all out and explain what you mean.
Cassius: Epicurus does not take the approach of dialectic — he takes the approach of the synoptic, which DeWitt talked about a lot at the beginning of this book, where in broad strokes you give the general structure of the philosophy and then you spend your time always referring back to the broad strokes, to the big picture, while you’re filling in the detail. That’s how you educate people to understand what you’re saying. It’s not by just asking questions. It’s one thing we see today on the internet a lot of.
Joshua: You know, I think there’s an analogy there to what Diogenes Laertius reports Epicurus recommending — against holding property in common — on the theory that holding property in common is not the way friends act. I think this is another application of that: just going back and forth ceaselessly with questions is not the way you treat a friend when you’re trying to explain something to them. When you’re dealing with someone who’s close to you and who you are attempting to beneficially help, you become as clear as possible with them and you don’t engage in the kind of games that you might play if you’re speaking to a class or speaking to people you don’t necessarily know and don’t really even know how they’re going to receive what you’re saying. When you’re dealing with someone who’s close to you and you’re really communicating with them, you can be honest and much more direct than you would otherwise.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a very good point. And what Epicurus says about holding property in common actually is that it betrays a lack of trust among friends. So the virtues that we’re talking about are very much there in that conversation as well. And in this context about friends as well, DeWitt talks about that his loyalty to friends will be absolute. Quote: “The wise man alone will know true gratitude, and in respect of his friends, whether present or absent, will be the same throughout the journey of life.” And that’s an interesting sideline that there’s an example of that. One of the fragments reads, quote: “He will put a certain kind of people to confusion and most assuredly will not watch men in their cups” — which apparently is a reference to the fact that when people get drunk, they say things that they might not necessarily have said when they’re not drunk, and that you don’t take advantage of those situations with your friends. DeWitt also mentions here — on that issue of watching men in their cups — this phrase that’s been expressed in Latin as in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth,” which was handled by Horace in a way acceptable to Epicurus in the fourth satire of his first book.
Joshua: Yeah, so that’s a good example of these anecdotes that are going to pepper the rest of our chapter here. Another example of it is in this next paragraph where Plutarch records that Idomeneus, Timocrates, and Herodotus published or wrote about the episode in which Epicurus was encouraged to leave Lampsacus — DeWitt calls him a “friendless refugee” at that point — as something that would have been embarrassing to Epicurus for them to be talking about, and yet Epicurus praised them instead, even though they had written about this information that was probably something that Epicurus would have been embarrassed about. It’s an obscure reference here that I don’t have much ability to process, but DeWitt cites Plutarch for the example showing again the priority that Epicurus placed on honesty.
Cassius: Right, and again the contrast to that is that essay by Lucian, Alexander the Oracle Monger, who had pretensions to being the son of a god, for example, even though he’s holding forth as an oracle in the part of the world where he grew up and where everybody knows who his parents were — that they were not high born, that they were low born — and that to claim that your father was Asclepius or whatever is just ridiculous. And Epicurus knows it’s ridiculous. But it would also be absurd to be ashamed that your parents were not gods. So this is why Epicurus doesn’t mind that his friends are sharing this information — because he’s not embarrassed by it. Other people — someone like Cicero, for example — would be embarrassed by it, because Cicero is a very vain person. But vanity is not really consistent with Epicurus’s project, and that seems to be the whole issue here.
Joshua: Yeah, that we can afford to tell the truth because we’re not going to be hurt when it comes out anyway.
Cassius: Yeah. He connects it here to the style of Saint Augustine in his book Confessions, when Saint Augustine is really probing deeply into his own life and his own habits in a way that people in the ancient world might not have been disposed to do — as much, for example, as Montaigne did for himself, to such an extent that even when these generals — these Greek and Roman generals like Xenophon or Julius Caesar — are writing about their campaigns, they’re so far from revealing their inner confession that they actually write these books in the third person. Julius Caesar doesn’t say “I sent this general over here to suppress this rebellion” — he says “Caesar sent this person over here to suppress the rebellion.” And Montaigne is so much more open and free and honest in what he’s writing. And that was probably not common in Greek literature.
Cassius: Not only not common in Greek literature, but the next point that DeWitt makes is an interesting one: that although no doubt Epicurus had friends that were closer and those who were less close, there’s “no record of esoteric doctrines being taught by Epicurus as were inherent in Platonism,” and that as in VS 29 he’s speaking his teachings as beneficial to all men — which is in contradiction to what Plato had been doing, which was excluding barbarians from the ideal government and also making reference to this idea of “noble lies” about how the lower classes have to be led, if necessary, by lies, by the upper classes.
Joshua: Yeah, you wouldn’t find — in fact you can look at the famous inscription that was said to sort of guard the doorway at Plato’s school of philosophy, which was: “Let no man who has not studied geometry enter here.” In other words, we’re going to keep people out if they don’t have the proper framework for understanding this stuff. Whereas the Epicureans will just stick it all up on a wall in the city of Oenoanda like Diogenes did.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I don’t know the details of this, but it’s a fairly interesting reference here to the esoteric doctrines such as were inherent in Platonism. I think I’ve read further about that — that there’s a lot of controversy out there in the academic world about what did Plato really teach inside his school to his closest friends, and was he really saying the same things to them that we know publicly that he was talking about.
Joshua: I know that by my personal experience from college and philosophy class — I had a professor who was talking to us — there’s apparently a famous professor at, I think, the University of Chicago, a man named Leo Strauss, who came up with this elaborate theory that Plato’s Republic was encoded with almost the opposite meaning of what he says in it. And if I remember correctly it was something about how when it starts out Plato and his friends are walking toward the city but he never gets there, or something like that — and so because of these facts of the story, he’s come up with this theory that well, you can deduce from the fact that they’re no longer living in the real town of Athens that everything is imaginary, and so therefore you can conclude that he really didn’t mean what he was saying about all these regimentation theories and community of women and children and so forth — those things were not intended by Plato to be taken literally. So there apparently is a lot of discussion that Plato would tell different things to different people depending on whether you were one of his inner golden circle or not — which is just the opposite of the way that Epicurus approached things.
Cassius: Right, and it’s an attitude that is common in Greek religion as well. For example, these mystery cults — where you have to be initiated into, for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries. So it’s not uncommon at that time. But it’s totally in contrast to what Epicurus is trying to do. It’s like Diogenes of Oenoanda says: I’m trying to reach everybody here, because everybody can benefit from this — slave or free, Greek or barbarian. It doesn’t matter, because anybody can study this philosophy and anybody can find it useful.
Joshua: Yeah, that seems to be the attractiveness that certain religions use to manipulate people. I guess Gnosticism has a reputation. And there’s a later religion that the Roman troops picked up — the one about killing the bull — I forget the name of that one. But the attractiveness is that there’s some hidden knowledge that they have a monopoly over, that if you become part of their cult, maybe they’ll share a little bit of it with you. An exclusivity that arises from that actually makes it more attractive because it makes it more enticing — to which VS 51 is an example of Epicurus’s opposite approach, where love is described as, quote: “Circling in dance around the whole earth, veritably shouting to us all to awaken to the blessedness of the happy life.” So there’s not a hidden truth. In fact, I think Torquatus says that nature is saying all of this to us directly if we’ll just listen to it.
Cassius: Yep. That religion — what you were describing among later Romans — is called Mithraism. The doctrine of resurrection of the flesh was a basic belief in the Mithraic circle. It was believed that the long struggle between the principles of good and evil would one day end. At this time a great bull would appear on earth, and Mithra would rend this end, and reawaken men to life.
Joshua: It’s like Plato’s cave, right? This idea that the world that we think we’re living in is actually the dream, and that we need to wake up from that to real life — and that to do that you need to get into some of these cultic practices, these secret programs that we’re attempting to do that. Epicurus again doesn’t have time for that approach, I don’t think.
Cassius: Yeah, that the whole world is some struggle between these supernatural forces of good and evil in which we’re just pawns and dependent upon the results of these beings that are struggling in some other dimension — it’s just absolutely the opposite of the way Epicurus is approaching things. Here’s another phrase from DeWitt: “The vogue of philosophy and especially Platonism, which for a time enjoyed the status of orthodoxy, seems to have produced a crop of hypocrisy just as religion did in later times.” And then he cites VS 54: “We should not make a pretense of philosophizing but honestly philosophize, because we need to possess real health and not the mere appearance of it.” And this sets his face against the subtle self-flattery that we know as smugness — and in particular against the mummery that went with the cult of the so-called Beautiful: “I spit upon the Beautiful and upon those who blindly extol it when it does not give pleasure.”
Joshua: Yeah, the Romantic poet John Keats wrote a poem called “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and the last two lines of the poem are: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” So this idea that when you look at beauty, you’re looking at truth. Again, Epicurus is saying that beauty is not the standard — pleasure is the standard. To the extent that beauty is worthwhile, it is worthwhile because it gives pleasure.
Cassius: Right. And that particular point about beauty is something Thomas Jefferson made — I think it’s in his letter to William Short. It may be in one of his other letters, to John Adams. But this idea that beauty is the key to goodness and correctness is something that we see in lots of different forms. It’s hard to imagine a more forceful rejection of all this praise of beauty as the interpretation of the good than to say that you spit upon beauty and upon those who blindly extol it when it does not give pleasure. This is an example of the honesty even when the hearer is going to be offended by it that Epicurus was willing to demonstrate because he thought it was so important.
Joshua: Yeah, being honest even when it’s difficult is one of the major themes of this whole section. Before we go into the next paragraph actually — and on that point — one thing that I noticed today, Cassius, and we’ve had a conversation I think about this, is this term called “gray rocking.” It’s called the gray rock method in psychology, where you deliberately act unresponsive or unengaged so that an abusive or manipulative person will lose interest in you. Abusive people thrive on emotions and trauma, and when you act indifferent and don’t show your emotions, they may lose interest and stop bothering you. This would be another example, and I just wanted to bring it up as an example of — you don’t have to always be running around telling the truth to every person. I’m surrounded by people, for example, who have widely different views than I do, and while I’m not going to lie to them about what I think, I also don’t have to be constantly badgering them about what I think is true because that’s not really helpful either. And the result of that probably is going to be that we’re just never going to talk to each other again, and when you’re dealing with family and friends — you know, really close friends, people you’ve known a long time — it becomes difficult to negotiate this stuff. So if asked the question I would try to answer as honestly as I could, but this sort of gallivanting honesty where you don’t care who you hurt — that kind of approach isn’t always the best thing either.
Cassius: Is there any better way to elaborate on that other than to say that we’re discussing virtues, honesty is this virtue, but virtue is not an end in itself? You’re not being honest just for the sake of being honest. You’re not volunteering information to people who have no reason to receive it and you have no reason to give it to them. Everything including honesty is in the service of the ultimate good, which is pleasure and the avoidance of pain. And so you’re not going to just go around volunteering on the street corner — as certain preachers have over the years loved to just stand on the street corner and preach out to anybody who might happen to be there, people walking by who have no interest in hearing. There’s nothing like that in Epicurus. You’re talking to people who wish to engage with you, and for those who don’t want to engage with you there’s no great commission that says that you’re going to go out to the inhabitants of some foreign island and give them the gospel, and if they don’t accept it, kill them. Everything we’re doing is for the ultimate goal of living pleasurably, and benefiting others helps yourself. If you’re not going to get a benefit out of a conversation, you’re not going to have that conversation.
Cassius: That actually carries us to this next point: DeWitt says that Epicurus was not immune to the tendency to idealize certain things — in that Epicurus declared friendship to be the most precious of acquisitions made by wisdom in the preparation for happy life, and he called it “an immortal good,” even higher than wisdom itself. But at the same time he stressed the utilitarian aspects of this, saying such as in VS 23: “Every friendship is desirable for its own sake, but it takes its beginning from assistance rendered.” So this is the example of what he’s using here — that even when we’re talking about something as important to us as friendship, we’re going to be very clear-eyed about it, that it takes its beginning from assistance rendered, that even though we may grow so close to the person that we would give our lives to save that person under the right circumstances, honesty demands that you recognize that in the beginning, when you did not know that person so well, friendship had its origin in the pleasure that you got from it.
Joshua: Right — and that’s one of the many reasons I’m not going door to door on Sunday morning.
Cassius: That’s right — waking people up to share with them the blessings of Epicurean philosophy.
Joshua: That’s right — that’s a great example. Where we’re doing a podcast, if people are interested in listening to it, we hope they’ll gain benefit from it. But we’re not certainly forcing anybody to listen to it. We’re not buying advertisements on the local Baptist church newsletter to ask them to listen to it. We’re speaking to people who hopefully will be interested in the information and might get some benefit out of listening to it.
Cassius: I’ve seen the word “DeWitticism” used, and so this is some more DeWitticisms here: “Human vanity is a great enemy of honesty. We flatter ourselves by erecting a false facade.” That’s what you were talking about earlier, Joshua, I think, about vanity not being consistent with Epicureanism. And then: “Human motives are usually mixed, but expediency dons the mask of idealism.” The reality is, no matter how idealistic somebody is claiming to be, they usually have motives beyond just the claimed affectation of this ideal abstraction that they’re pursuing.
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t know why, but it makes me think of this scene in the HBO series Rome when Caesar is marching on the capital and Pompey doesn’t have his legions ready. And so Brutus runs home and he’s talking to his mother, and he says half of the senate is a horse leaving the city. That for all their vanity and gravity and affectation as Rome’s leading men — as soon as something really important comes along, as soon as there is need of expediency, as he says here — the affectation comes to an end and when the rubber meets the road it’s time to act, it’s time to dispense with vanity and to engage with things truly and honestly and as they really are.
Cassius: So DeWitt is saying that vanity is a great enemy of honesty and that Epicurus is suggesting that we combine unfailing courtesy with unfailing sincerity, directness, and outspokenness. And that this is something that came to be valued and handed down to us through the word candor and the adjective “candid” in Latin. There are examples of it that Horace was talking about — several of his friends, Virgil, Plotius, and Varius, who were Epicureans, as being extremely candid. And you can go further into Latin talking about comitas and severitas, and this was used in reference to the Epicurean Atticus by his biographer who described him in his quote: “He would neither utter a falsehood nor would he endure to hear one. As a consequence, his courtesy was not without sternness, nor his reserve without affability — so it was hard to decide which feeling was uppermost among his friends, respect or affection.” Both of which are good terms. There’s even a reference here to Mark Antony — who’s not usually identified as much of an Epicurean personality — but that Mark Antony in his personal relationships allowed people to be critical when he thought it was beneficial to do so.
Joshua: And the generation of Antony had available on the topic the handbook of Philodemus — which I think is the one on rhetoric — and that Philodemus seems to have sided with Antony against Octavian/Caesar Augustus.
Cassius: Yeah, and he’s got that book that’s often translated as On Frank Speech.
Joshua: Absolutely. This is once again that word parrhesia that we mentioned at the beginning of this section.
Cassius: So the final paragraph that DeWitt says today: “Such was honesty as Epicurus conceived it — a total integrity of character. It was enjoined by nature. To preserve it was the objective of education. It was destroyed by the study of rhetoric and dialectic. It was opposed to sycophancy in politics, obsequiousness in court life, smugness and hypocrisy in private life. It demanded total loyalty to friends combined with absolute frankness in mutual criticism.” So okay, that’s bringing us close to the end of this episode on this topic of honesty. Why don’t we go around and take closing comments at this point? Martin, any closing comments on honesty?
Martin: No, I have nothing to add, thanks.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t think I have much to add either. Honesty is clearly very, very central to Epicurus’s project. You can’t really have interesting and real conversations about difficult subjects — particularly subjects that are contrary to the orthodoxy of whether that’s Greek religion or politics or the Roman state or imperium — you can’t have those conversations if you’re not willing to be honest and to speak frankly what you think is true. And so you can imagine all the reasons why this is important. But you can also imagine all the reasons why there are entrenched groups who have an interest in being lied to — and this is why kings and rulers, particularly vain kings and rulers, have this perceived interest in surrounding themselves with sycophants when in fact what they really need to surround themselves with is people who are capable of giving them frank criticism. I’ve been reading once again this book by Justin Pollard and Howard Reed, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, about how the first kings and pharaohs of this new Greek city-state and larger empire — Egypt, the resurgence of Egypt under the Ptolemies — started out very strong. It ended up getting very weak in part because, as you often do with hereditary monarchy, you end up with people who are not well equipped to handle office and particularly the throne and everything that goes with it. And instead of having good people surrounding them that are likely to instruct them in how to rule when they’re young so that they can do it better themselves when they’re old, they surround themselves with sycophants. And I think it was John Dryden who said that Horace in his later years was a well-mannered court slave because he switched sides to Octavian after the civil wars. So all of these issues are brought up in this area, but nowhere so much as in philosophy — is it important to have a good firm handle on the truth and to be able to tell the truth even when it’s difficult.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that’s a great place to close. And it’s particularly galling out there to see comments made that Epicurean philosophy is something which expects its students to be slavishly devoted to what Epicurus said and to just take everything on authority and not have thoughts of their own. It’s galling because it’s 100% the opposite of what Epicurus was teaching. Honesty and the questioning of authority is at the very center of Epicurean philosophy. And there’s no way that Epicurus could have taught this to his students without them understanding that he meant for them to question indeed what he himself was teaching. There’s an excellent phrase in Lucretius that I’m not going to be able to quote in full — about how a new direction in philosophy is presenting itself to you, you need to examine it as closely as you can, and if you find it to be true, embrace it; but if you find it to be false, to do everything you can to swat it down. That’s the attitude of Epicurean philosophy — one of inquiry, one of pursuing the evidence wherever it leads, even when it might be uncomfortable to find the result of your investigation, which it often is when we live in a world that is corrupted by religion and false philosophy as we do.
Cassius: Well, why don’t we bring it to a close on that point this week. We’ll come back next week and discuss the next section on faith — which is a subject we’ll have to go into in great detail, because again this is a word that is corrupted. Faith means blind faith in most usage, and we will see in the Epicurean scheme of things how you can have confidence in something without having blind faith. But we’ll treat that next week. In the meantime, please stop by the forum, let us know your questions and comments, and join us next week. Thanks and see you then.